Render Machines Slow To Start

[tommygdawg]

Hey all,

I've got a couple of older machines that I use as render nodes. When I start a render on my workstation, I've noticed, depending on the complexity of the scene, it can take upwards of 10 minutes for the render nodes to get added to the scene. For reference, these are the specs for my two main machines:

Workstation:
Ryzen 9 9950x 16 core, not overclocked
96gb RAM

Render node
Threadripper 1950x 16 core, not overclocked
64gb RAM.

On a complex scene I'm currently rendering via Vray 6 CPU, the local machine starts rendering immediately, but the render node can take upwards of 10 minutes to start rendering. I'm using a wired local ethernet connection for these machines. On less complex scenes, I've found it can still take up to a minute or two, which on simpler scenes leads to me often not even using distributed rendering.

Is there any way to speed this up? What contributes to this? Is it simply a factor of my nodes being older or having lower specs? Is it because when launching a render from 3DS Max, a lot of the scene is already loaded into my RAM?

Even if speed improvements aren't possible, would still love to learn more about how it works!

Thank you!

[alexander.kazandzhiev]

Hi, I am not sure what's the case. Generally when DR is starting the client saves the scene and sends it to the server. So when the transfer is done the client can start rendering as you mentioned it has the scene already loaded. But the server would start loading it and then prepare for rendering. And then if Transfer missing assets is enabled the server would have to wait for the assets two when they are needed.
So it doesn't sound like it's impossible, but depends on the scene and the setup. If you try to measure the time from loading the scene to starting render locally on the server machine and it's in the same ballpark I would say it's nothing to worry about.

Best regards,
Alexander

[Joelaff]

The client nodes have SSD or NVME (m.2), right? HDD slows everything down.